Article June 9, 1906 Issue

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with contributions from F. W. Walker Pugh, James D. Moffat, Oswald Garrison Villard

To the student of the New Testament nothing is more marked than the difference in tone and atmosphere between the Church of the first century and the Church of the twentieth as we know it. The difference is principally this—the loss of the sense of power. The apostles trod the earth like gods. They challenged the world with their remedy. We apologize for our existence, and are content if Jesus Christ can find a place with Buddha and Mahomet in a World's Parliament of Religions. From every page of the New Testament there breathes like mountain air, like a wind from heaven, the sense of certainty, the full, unqualified, unlimited feeling of capacity. It throbs with the sense of Almightiness. Force is in every tone, victory in every sentence. "What hast thou in thine hand?"

F. W. Walker Pugh.
The Standard.

If the chief object of our lives is to build our block houses, and to build bigger and bigger houses every year and to fight each other to try to get more houses than some other fellow, and to count ourselves successful when we have a hundred houses when we cannot by any possibility live in more than one of them, then when something knocks down a few of our houses the disaster seems very serious. Or if success means a nine-course dinner and throwing away more food than we use, and we are brought down to just enough to nourish us for a few days, then no smaller word than calamity will cover our condition. But if we have cultivated that nature in which the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment, then are we possessed of a different standard of values, and will get a different result.—

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